This dispatch in the Guardian ( London and Manchester), January 30, 1970, raises fundamental questions about the accuracy of official U.S. and Saigon data on casualties, and reinforces the more critical accounts published here.

SAIGON "FALSIFYING" CASUALTY FIGURES

The former director of a Canadian Government medical mission to Vietnam yesterday accused the Saigon Government of
falsifying for three years the scale of war casualties, malnutrition, and plague in South Vietnam.

Dr. Alje Vennema said in London that plague victims in
one provincial hospital at Quang Ngai--where the alleged
Pinkville massacre took place--were 10 times greater than the
South Vietnam Ministry of Health's official figure for the
whole country over the same period.

His records, compiled as mission director at Quang Ngai
hospital from 1965-67, are the first substantial challenge to Saigon's figures, on which journalists and the World Health
Organisation rely. WHO has already designated it as having
in recent years the world's worst prevalence of pneumonic and
bubonic plague epidemics.

PLAGUE CASES

Dr. Vennema, aged 37, a Dutchman who resigned his post in August, 1968, to do postgraduate research in tropical medicine
at Sully hospital, has consolidated his Quang Ngai records
into a paper.

He told a press conference: "Between 1965 and 1967 we
treated some 2,500 plague cases at Quang Ngai alone, in comparison with the Health Ministry's figure of altogether 250
for the whole country."

In the three years they treated 12,000 civilian war casualties, most suffering from artillery wounds received in a zone
under fire from the Americans. Thirty per cent of wounded
were women and 40 per cent children under 16. The death
rate was 15-20 per cent.

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